ABSTRACT
Traditional histories of Mesopotamia are obliged by the nature of their sources to recount the rise and fall of dynasties – from Amurath to Amurath. Although we are deliberately eschewing the recitation of lists, the alternation of strong centralized political control with periods of turmoil is so characteristic of Mesopotamian history that the events recorded in royal inscriptions cannot be simply ignored: documentary and archaeological sources cluster in the periods of peace, and the recurrent effects on the social institutions we are describing are too evident to be missed. Changes may be the direct consequence of political acts, or more indirectly of economic conditions or of the expansion or contraction of geographical horizons. Even the more subtle changes, such as the apparent shift towards private from institutional enterprise, or the gradual separation of cities from their hinter-lands, can be related more convincingly to particular political situations than to some long-term yeast. It would be dangerous to deny that some underlying trends may have Outline of archaeological and historical periods https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203825662/7d67eeaa-4db1-4524-a760-f6975bc16be7/content/fig2_1.tif"/> 23 been at work within the Mesopotamian urban society independently of, or indeed in spite of, the potent extraneous influences imposed by dynastic ambitions and disasters, but they are hard to detect behind these much more dramatic oscillations. The similarities between one period of prosperity and another, one ‘Dark Age’ or Zwischenzeit and another, seem more than their differences (see chapter 16 ).
